“Everyone compares us to other pops,” said former soul singer Olivier Dionne, co-founder of Bec Soda Inc. “We’re not another pop. We’re an alternative to what’s widely available. We created an organic soda line, of which there are very few worldwide. I don’t want it to be just a novelty that people try once.”

Bec Soda’s bottled drinks use only natural, organic ingredients and are sweetened primarily with Quebec-produced maple syrup. It’s a niche product, yet one that has quickly found an audience.

Dionne, 32, said the company already has sold 500,000 275-ml bottles this year, in Canada and in Europe, and it has been approached by Whole Foods Market, the large U.S.-based health-food chain. In May, Bec Soda won the “youth business international beyond borders award” from Futurpreneur Canada, a non-profit organization that provides mentoring and support to business owners aged 18 to 39.

“I lived in Europe for a while and they’re very into organic foods there, much more than here,” Dionne said. “It made me understand how important it is. That’s one reason we’ve been there, in France, Belgium and Switzerland, for eight months. The other is that a lot of our early marketing and labelling was in French only, so those were markets we could enter easily. We’re at 1,000 selling points there. But we also have bilingual labelling now.”

Dionne, whose father was a local restaurateur, founded Bec Soda with two friends, brothers Gwendal and Kevin Creurer, 28 and 34.

“Gwendal is a motion designer in the computer industry. Kevin is a music teacher. I’m a guide, hired by travel agencies to be a group leader for trips abroad,” Dionne said.

All three have kept their jobs. There’s enough free time and flexibility in their schedules to oversee Bec Soda as well, Dionne said. In essence, they operate the business out of their homes. Production is subcontracted to a firm in Terrebonne.

The seed for Bec Soda was planted four years ago.

“Gwendal and I happened to be looking at a bottle of Coke and decided to read the ingredients. I was stunned to see how long the list was. So many artificial ingredients. Refined sugar. We got to thinking, why isn’t it possible to create the same fun taste, but naturally? So we set out to try.”

The first step was having a chemist deconstruct a generic cola. With professional advisers, they then set about recreating it, removing the artificial ingredients and substituting natural alternatives. It took two years to find a formula that passed the taste test, Dionne said.

Olivier Dionne prepares bottles of Bec Soda for passersby to taste in front of Fou d’Ici supermarket on de Maisonneuve Blvd. in downtown Montreal on Friday June 17, 2016.

The partners have about $140,000 of their own money tied up in the company, and got loans and grants as well.

“From day one, the plan was to make it a locally produced product, certified organic,” Dionne said. “You needed sugar in there to sweeten it — it’s a soda, not a salad — and for us, it seemed logical to use maple syrup for that. It’s a natural product, and good for your health. We actually worked with the federation (Fédération des producteurs acéricoles du Quebec), because we told them our intention was to eventually have a whole line of flavours and export large quantities of product. I think we surprised them with how far we’ve come already.”

While there is some organic beet sugar in the cola, 88 per cent of the sugar content is from maple syrup, resulting in a taste less sweet than a standard soda, he said.

The company’s initial product, Bec Cola, went on sale two years ago. The packaging already has changed once, with the bottle now engraved instead of having a sticker attached.

The retail price normally ranges from $1.99 to $2.40. A four-pack is typically $8.

They sold 50,000 bottles the first year, but things have snowballed from there. Two new flavours, lime and cranberry, are being introduced this month, and the entire production run of 100,000 bottles was pre-sold. Dionne said other flavours are in the pipeline.

“Our plan was to make it available throughout Quebec first. We have 1,200 points of sale here now,” including major grocery and health-food chains, Dionne said. “You can’t market it as an authentic taste of Quebec if people can’t find it where they live. Our distributor (Horizon Nature) has done an excellent job.”

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